Now we’re getting to the good stuff. The French drain is of course taking longer than it should, I need to buy more stones to use around the French drain pipe that is going in the ground. But one of the benefits of all this is that I’m digging out a decent amount of dirt that’s being replaced with the hollow pipe and rock, and so once again I’ve come up with a purpose for this which involves yet another yard project – the side bed.

You see about a year or two ago, we ripped out some old buses along the other side of our house closest to Bob Neighbor. There is a tree bush thing that we kept, but where the bigger unwieldy bushes were those are now gone and I started to replace it with empty mulch and grass. I got about halfway done before the project was put on pause because, well, summer was over. But now I can take that dirt that I’m removing for the French drain and put it here in the side yard.

Why do I need dirt there? Because once again this was filed with weed barrier and those little gray stones. I was able to get nearly all of them up on this portion but that left the grass in my yard a good two to four inches above where the stones were. And, more importantly, the water would actually run into the foundation, not away from it, which would be really really bad over time. So I needed to build this up, and pitch it slightly away from the house.

And if you’re wondering what happened to the stone that was here, it went behind the retaining wall to help level out the area where the shed is going.

Next I covered up as much of the French drain as I could, and started to seed over it. This is only about a third of the French drain.

The following week I finished digging the French drain out to the side of the house, where it will connect to the gutter drain pipe. Let me explain…

You see when I first moved into my house we noticed that the side of our house that borders town property, where they have a drainage ditch dug out, seemed to be eroding into aforementioned ditch. Half of the gutters on my house are emptying down this slope into the drainage ditch. And so no lie it was almost a foot lower than it probably should have been. I installed a drain pipe from the front gutters to the drainage ditch very early on. I had bought enough pipe to run a second, but just never got around to it. It wasn’t as important because of how the gutters were run at my house (I’ll explain in a moment), but I felt like should still be done for the sake of it’s the right thing to do.

The gutter on the front of my house splits drainage on each side, half to Bob Neighbor’s side and the other half empties into the front garage gutter. It’s this front garage gutter that I originally piped to the drainage ditch. The back gutter on my house all drains to Bob Neighbor’s side. So only the back garage gutter would get drained out.

Okay, with that explanation out of the way, since I was going to be running the French drain out to the drainage ditch, I might as well connect in that back garage gutter. Besides, if I had my way, if I were to ever replace my gutters I’d try to run all water down the side into the drainage ditch and have none of it run to the Bob Neighbor side, since that side gets swampy. I’m not sure gutters could handle the volume of water though.

I still needed to dig out the remaining half to the drainage ditch. Once done, I then test fit with the pipe to ensure there’s enough of a pitch so water drains out went relatively well, but some minor alterations were needed. I was doing this work late at night on a Thursday, because on Friday, the shed was about to be installed, and I didn’t want the shed folk to have to jump over a ditch where I was running pipe.

On Friday, I finished cutting the pipe, added the T to connect the French drain portion in, again, tested the pitch, and began the processes of replacing the dirt on top of this. Note that because this is just drain pipe with no holes, the pipe goes right into the ground, no need to add drainage rocks like the French drain pipe. Notice in the pictures that the second half of the French drain remains uncovered.

And now the shed begins installation! This may have been some of the most exciting work that I’ve had done since we got the new windows in our house. I was essentially buying space. And I knew that as time passed I was going to need it, or else one of us was going to lose their parking spot in the garage!

They did have some issues where they needed to cut wood to make it work, for some reason. Everything came from the factory with everything pre-cut and ready to assemble. But they managed to fix the issues and got everything done within a day! I now had an extra 80 square feet (plus a little more – more on that later) of storage.

And on that note we end Part 2. Part 3 will go over getting electricity up to the shed, and then after an intermission while we went to Disney World, more work on the side yard, and completion of the French drain (finally!). There will be a Part 4 where I add some finishing touches to the shed as well!

Soooo, I’m way past this update. The last post I really had was about the shed, and how I was working on clearing out the spot for it. I’m happy to report, that was about three projects ago, and all went well. I’ll touch on the other projects shortly, but here’s how the Shed all went down.

From start to finish, this project took 7 months. Why you might ask? Well, because besides leveling and clearing the site for the shed, roped in with this project ended up being 4 other projects:

• French drain
• Gutter drain
• Electrical work
• Side of house bed and mulch

I’ll get into each of those in a bit, and in fact I’ll split this up into three or four parts. But I’ll start with some remaining shed leveling and the French drain

First, the site you saw in my previous post we had just ripped out the big rock. I needed to finish some of the leveling and rip out some old stumps. The stump wasn’t going to be in the way of the shed, but would get in the way of getting into and out of the shed, so it had to go.

I also needed some additional dirt for the ground (the darker dirt below), and I used rocks that were “excavated” to make a pretend retaining wall for the area that was dug out.

Then add some stone to make the space for the foundation as solid as I could, plus give me a little extra room for leveling. This, also, has the added benefit of me using the pile of stone that Jen and I collected and stored behind the garage. The stone was originally used in the flower beds around the house.

Now while all this was going on, I decided, I’m not tired of digging yet. You see after clearing this whole site for the shed, it was going to be some time before the shed was actually manufactured and subsequently installed. And I had some other plans.

The French Drain – The Beginning

A French drain is to help drainage in your yard. Due to a combination of things, including poor soil, compacted soil from when they built my retaining wall, and an excessively wet summer after the wall was built, we had a lot of water pooling up in our back yard. This really hurt the grass we were trying to grow. So step 1, till the yard a bit, and break up the dirt.

Step 2, start to dig up a channel to lay the french drain pipe.

Now this had an unintended benefit – one, I’ll have extra dirt as the french drain will displace some of the dirt that I’m digging up. I can use this dirt to fill in the side of the house where it’s a little low and finish the bed there. And the rocks that come up can be used to complete both the rock wall I have by the town’s fence and the wall of dirt I created by the shed.

Next, lay some weed barrier down, put down a little stone (which I had to buy – I wanted larger stone that would allow better water flow than the small stone I just used as a base for the shed), lay the French drain pipe, and fill with stone, cover with the weed barrier, and finally cover over with dirt.

That French drain pipe is essentially black drain pipe with pre-made holes throughout to let the water in. The theory is the water that goes on top of the ground seeps in to the French drain cavity that was just created, through the rocks, and into the pipe. The pipe has a slight grade to it was well to drain the water out.

Of course nothing is ever easy – there was a lot of rock to move, and some of it was a bit stubborn. In fact in some places I had to dig from side to side a couple of feet to get to the other side of some of the rock in order to get the rock out of the ground. I wanted as straight a shot with the pipe as possible.

Alright, so that’s it for Part 1, where we went from the beginning of May to mid June. Remember, this is mostly only happening on the weekends. In Part 2, I’ll go over the next phase of the French drain, the gutter drain, the side bed, and the shed installation – which all runs from mid June to the end of June, so things start to pick up!

So I haven’t been doing much of sleeping recently. The start of a new school year is almost upon us (albeit delayed slightly due to mold…). So it’s my usual time of the year to stay up late and do all the stuff that needs to get done before children arrive. But tonight I thought I’d get some sleep. Unfortunately after the 5 hours of sleep my body is used to getting, it woke up. At 3am.

Thanks body.

But a strange thing happened when I woke up. I think I caught my brain indexing through life memories. I started to think about childhood friends – you know, the ones you grew up with but lost in touch with in high school, let alone adulthood. I started to think about my best friend from middle school like Onofrio and friends grammer school friends like Kevin, Sal, Marc and Josh. What ever happened to Mike the Ranger fan or Arpan when he moved? Oh gosh and remember Ryan? What ever happened to these people?

If only there was some place where I could go online to catch up with these old friends, see what they’re up to, maybe even see pictures of them and they’re lives they’ve built.

Crap. I just invented Facebook, didn’t I?

So I have just watched the latest trailer for the new Star Trek series that’s coming out in 2017.  If you haven’t seen it yet – here you go:

My initial impression (as is the initial impression of the calm and reasonable folks that make up YouTube commenters) is that… the ship looks god awful.  I mean… I get it – it can’t look too modern and streamlined because it has to fit neatly between certain time periods in the Star Trek universe.

Side note – I initially thought that this was to sit between the Original Series and Next Generation – but that might be off slightly – it may sit between the Original Series and the Original Series movies.

Anyway, getting back to this new ship, the U.S.S. Discovery.  So yeah, I think they did a really bad job on the design of the ship.

But…

I’m so needing a new Star Trek series.  I watched Star Trek Voyager from start to finish.  Then I watched Star Trek Deep Space Nine from start to finish.  I found myself missing it.  I hear the iconic music when the camera pans across the bow of the ship and I get goosebumps.  And I don’t know exactly why – like seriously I don’t get it.  But there’s something that draws me to the series, to the ships, to the characters – that I can’t seem to get enough of.  I can’t wait to see the new movie (which just came out a few days ago), but the movies have a different taste then the series.  The series can build more on the characters and really build great stories that don’t involve the ship blowing up every episode.

So, I will give the poor ship design a pass – I’ll even give the fact that CBS is either planning on burying it on CBS All Access.  Or they feel pretty confident that they will recoup the production costs on new user subscriptions on their streaming platform based on Trek fans flocking to pick up the service.  I just hope it does well enough to continue on for a few years, or spawn something even greater. Please CBS…. please do it right.  Trek fans need this.